Two Drums in the Grey
by Wynn
Summary: It's the punch the wakes him, not Natasha breaking into his motel room or approaching his bed, not her reaching out to touch him, foolish, so foolish, her fingertips brushing against the hair that sticks to his forehead as he dreams, not even when his arm darts out and seizes her hand.


AN: Title a lyric from "Run" by Daughter.

Two Drums in the Grey

By: Wynn

It's the punch the wakes him, not Natasha breaking into his motel room or approaching his bed, not her reaching out to touch him, foolish, so foolish, her fingertips brushing against the hair that sticks to his forehead as he dreams, not even when his arm darts out and seizes her hand. She winces as the metal digs into her skin but she doesn't try to jerk away, this sure to aggravate the situation. Instead, she says his name, or what had been his name, trying to reach for what Steve had sworn repeatedly was there.

"Bucky."

His hand tightens around her wrist. Natasha feels her skin break, feels blood begin to drip down her wrist. She hates the name, but she says it again.

"Bucky, wake up."

His eyes dart beneath closed lids, still caught in his dream. His breath quickens and his grip intensifies. She has maybe five seconds before her bones start to break.

So she punches him, violence their shared vocabulary. At least the one they know.

The blow echoes in the small room. His head snaps to the side from the impact. Natasha retracts her hand as he opens his eyes, and she considers but discards going for her knife, wishing to avoid bloodshed with Steve's friend. Yet in her hesitation, she's given him time to thrust out his other hand. He buries it in her shirt and heaves, throwing her across the room. Natasha twists in the air, lands on her back on the other bed and bounces to her feet as he springs to his. He has a gun in his right hand, and she tenses, damning herself again for her foolishness, for her sentiment, but he freezes when he locks eyes with her.

"I'm not here to hurt you," she says in his hesitation.

His gaze darts from her to the door behind her.

"Or bring you in. I'm alone."

He looks back at her. Long hair frames his face, tangled and damp from his dream. His beard in the dim light resembles his mask, a dark swath of protection hiding his face. He wears the same black pants as he did in D.C. though more than a month has passed. Natasha spots two badly repaired rips along his left leg, souvenirs from his stop in Lisbon, she suspects. His short-sleeve tee exposes his metal arm, high enough for her to see a dash of black paint where his star used to be.

"Steve?" he asks, his voice creaking and hoarse.

Natasha shakes her head. "He thinks you're in Lisbon still." She pauses then and summons a wry smile. "And he thinks I'm in Guam."

His brow creases. "Guam?"

Natasha shrugs. "Pretty beaches."

He glances again at the door. "So why're you here?"

"To talk to you."

He tenses, irritation flitting across his face. "I told him in New York. I'm not—"

"Not everything is about Steve, even for you. And especially not for me."

This shuts him up. He peers at her across the dim room, curiosity dulling the suspicion on his face. She rides out his suspicion, careful not to move though her wrist aches and blood gums on her skin. After a moment, he begins to ease down onto the bed, as careful in his movements as she had been in restraining hers. He lays his gun beside him then waits, and Natasha takes this as an invitation to sit. She lowers herself until she sits like him, feet flat on the floor, hands in full view. Like this, she sees the damage to her wrist, but she'll take abrasions and a ring of bruises to another gunshot to her chest.

"You have three minutes."

Natasha nods. It was more time than she imagined she'd have, if she even convinced him to talk to her in the first place, yet even with the permission and her time ticking down, she finds that she hesitates. Steve said Bucky lingered within, cited his rescue from the Potomac as proof. The fact that he hadn't shot her on sight perhaps serves as secondary evidence. The only way she'd know for sure if more lurked beneath the Soldier is if she did what she intended to do.

Still, she takes another moment to settle herself with a breath. Then she asks.

"Do you remember me?"

The smallest of sighs escapes him. Natasha thinks he'd roll his eyes if he didn't want to keep her in constant sight.

"Not from D.C.," she clarifies, mouth twitching in amusement at his offense. "Or Odessa."

He frowns at her. "I don't—"

"From before," she says, willing herself to hold his stare.

He eyes her, suspicious again. "Why do you ask?"

Natasha hesitates. He tilts his head as the silence grows, curiosity rearing within him once more at her reticence. Her stomach begins to roil as it first had a week ago when she reached this file in the data, but she swallows her discomfort and dives in.

"I read my file. My real file. The one Pierce had."

He— not Bucky, maybe James or Barnes, something more than just the Soldier— says nothing, but he clenches his jaw at her revelation. Pierce, at least, he remembers.

Natasha shrugs and picks a nonexistent piece of lint from her pants. "It's not everyday you learn you're really sixty-two and not twenty-seven." She looks up at him and forces a smile. "Guess I'll have to give Sam all my 'Steve is an old man' jokes. I can be a lot, but never a hypocrite."

He doesn't smile in return, but he does settle back, his rage and suspicion finally giving way. She watches him assess her, try to figure her out, her purpose here. His gaze wanders from head to toe, taking in her darker hair, the diamonds in her ears and her silk shirt. They settle a beat longer on her bruised wrist. She narrows her eyes as his mouth flattens, as he looks away.

"Why tell me?"

She stays silent, long enough for his eyes to flicker back to her. Then she says, "You're in my file."

His frown returns. He leans forward, perhaps to argue with her, no reference to her, she's sure, in what he's found so far, but he restrains himself. "How?" he asks instead.

"Apparently you helped train me." She chances a hint of a smile. She needs to. "Which helps explain how I kicked your ass in D.C."

His mouth falls open. "You did not."

Natasha reclines, bracing herself on her right hand. She crosses her legs and actually lets her foot swing a bit as she says, "I broke your glasses. Fried your arm."

He raises both brows. "I shot you."

She smirks at him. "With a Derringer. I used a grenade launcher. Clearly the superior weapon."

"Which was mine."

Natasha shrugs. "Finders keepers."

He— she needed to decide on a name, James too intimate, despite her caress, Barnes then— Barnes gapes at her. Natasha understands, humor a thing long dead in his life. She opens her mouth to rib him again when he stills. Sharp eyes stare at her, close in their scrutiny. She gets why Hydra had to wipe him so many times when, a moment later, he says quietly, "There's something else."

Natasha would smile at his keen assessment if it didn't mean admitting this, the cause of her foolishness, what sent her halfway across the world and left a blooming ring of bruises around her wrist. She drops the grasp at humor and straightens, breathing in to control the sudden spike in her pulse.

"Apparently," she says slowly, watching Barnes as he does her, "we were more than comrades."

Absolute silence follows her revelation.

"Not for long," she continues. "But longer than you'd expect given where we were."

She sees his breath quicken, his brow furrow. She hasn't let someone look at her this intently in a long time.

"How long?" he asks, his voice a rough scrape.

"Six months."

"When?"

Natasha hesitates, not to spare her discomfort, but to spare his. Yet her silence unsettles him, it stiffens his spine, so she responds. "1970."

His eyes widen, but this is the only response he gives, conditioned as he is to keep everything in, to hide all thought and emotion. She understands his surprise. She doubted he considered falling in love to be the reason for the worst torture and longest imprisonment in cryo he endured aside from his initial capture.

She eases to her feet then and plucks the flash drive from her jeans. "Everything's on here," she says, holding it out to him. "My file. What I found of yours. And the security footage of Pierce's death."

His gaze drops to the flash drive.

"I thought you'd want to see," she continues when he makes no move to take the drive. "I know I would. I'm just sorry you couldn't do it yourself."

Barnes looks at her again. "He didn't make me this way."

Natasha stares at him a moment before lowering her arm. "No. He just sent you after the man who used to be your friend, likely knowing who you are."

His gaze sharpens on her. "Are?"

"Yes. Are." At his raised brows, she says, "Kind of hard to argue against it, given what you fished out of the Potomac."

Barnes averts his eyes, and Natasha wonders, again, what made him do it, jump in after Steve and pull him out as the Helicarrier crashed all around them. Whether he had really remembered as Steve had said or if had just chosen as she had chosen when faced with Clint so long ago. Natasha wonders if she would have made the same choice now if she had known the truth, the extent to which they had unmade her. She looks at Barnes, still upon the bed, and can't fathom discerning a truth perhaps beyond all reach.

"I don't know if it's better to be in your shoes or mine," she says quietly.

Barnes regards her from the corners of his eyes.

Natasha swallows, again hesitant, though she wonders why. She had laid bare what she thought was her life when she downloaded the S.H.I.E.L.D. mainframe onto the net. Yet then she didn't have to look at those who would see. She didn't have to bare herself as well as her life. Now she does and to a man she barely knows, to one she likely knew in a way she hasn't since.

Perhaps this is why she speaks.

"I don't remember anything. They altered my memory before they altered me, so there was no way for my brain to repair the damage. I don't know if Natalia is my real name or one they gave me. I—" She stops, too close to emotion. This he hasn't earned, despite their past. Flashing him a tight smile, she says, "There's nothing."

If pity stared back at her, she would have pocketed the flash drive and left. But she sees no pity, only awareness, Barnes regarding her now as a person, not as a target or a foe. He eases to his feet, his movements slow, the gun left behind on the bed. A foot separates them. He makes no move to close the distance though or to reach for the drive.

Instead, he says, "I've been nothing."

"And?"

He shrugs. "Depends on whether you like pain."

The statement cuts too close, so Natasha cocks a brow and dredges up a smirk from the depths of her training. "Depends on the kind of pain."

He rolls his eyes, something like a smile waiting in the wings. His face still transforms even without the full grin, resurrecting Bucky Barnes. The sight is not unappealing. "Not that kind," he says after a moment. Now the grin comes, bolder than she thought it would be. "Unfortunately."

No, the sight is not unappealing.

Barnes holds her gaze a beat longer then he looks at the flash drive. "You believe it? What it says about us?"

"I'm inclined to. A falsified file hidden the way this one was serves no purpose. Maybe it was a failsafe against future disloyalty. But even then, the participants would have to remember for that kind of blackmail to be effective."

He nods. But his brow still creases, doubt remaining.

"You don't?" she asks.

He shakes his head.

"Why not?"

"Who would love the Soldier?" he asks, meeting her eyes.

"No one," she admits. "But if you were only ever the Winter Soldier, they wouldn't have put you in cryo nearly as much as they did."

He turns his head away, his body tensing.

The discomfort affects her. Perhaps it had then too. Natasha eases closer to him, waits for him to look at her. Then she says softly, "From what I know about James Barnes, if he was there, he would have tried to help me. And from what I know about me, I would have appreciated it."

"Is that what it was?" he asks, his gaze upon her intent. "Appreciation?"

The mind forgets, but the body remembers, and his pulls to hers like the shore to a wave. Nerves buzzing, she shakes her head. "They wouldn't have tortured you like they did if that's all it was. For either of us."

Emotion clouds his eyes, anger and, surprisingly, though the surprise surprises her given what he's been doing the past month, an ache to know. She still sees the dark shadow who stalked her through the streets of D.C. and laid in wait for her in Odessa, but the shadow's taken shape, been molded into a man.

Slowly, Barnes reaches out and takes the flash drive from her hand. He is careful not to touch her. She wishes in that moment that he was less careful, and it is this more than anything that cements for her the truth in the file, that prompts her to say, "There's a 6:30 train to St. Petersburg. If you're interested in pulling that thread."

He says nothing to her invitation, but Natasha doesn't expect him to. Not until he reviews the files. She looks at him another moment then turns to leave, her back to him as she walks to the door, the gesture of trust perhaps the most significant signal of all.

He slides into the seat beside her at 6:29.

Careful not to smile, Natasha flips to the next page in her magazine. Barnes wears civilian clothes, dark jeans and a black jacket, his combat boots and at least three guns and two knives. Sometime in the night he shaved the beard, leaving a bit of scruff in its wake. His hair falls into his face as he leans over and shoves a duffel bag beneath the seat, likely carrying more weapons.

"What convinced you?" she asks when he straightens.

"You electrocuting yourself."

Natasha blinks then smiles then starts to laugh.

"Not that way," he says as the train lurches forward.

The exasperation in his voice prolongs her laughter. Perhaps she could still use some of her old man jokes, despite her new age. She closes the magazine and turns toward Barnes. "Then in what way?"

Barnes tilts his head and meets her eyes. He shoves impatiently at the hair still in his face, but his gaze is calm as he assesses her. Natasha lets him look. "That's you," he says after a moment. "Ruthless. Selfless. Determined to do what's right. And from what I know about me, that's something I would have appreciated."

His words affect her, as belief in her from others always has. But Natasha gives only a noncommittal nod and opens the magazine again.

"So what should I call you?" he asks. "Comrade? Widow?"

His dry tone brings the smile back to her face. "Natasha works. That is my name, after all."

Barnes just nods, refusing to pick up that particular thread. He scans the train, inspects the man three rows up that she already dismissed as a threat.

"What about you?" she asks after a moment. "What should I call you?"

He shrugs. "James, I guess. Or Barnes. Whatever you prefer."

She peers at him from the corners of her eyes. "Not Bucky?"

"If you want."

"I don't. It's a ridiculous name."

James laughs at that. "It kind of is." He looks at her now, and the sharpness returns to his gaze, muting his amusement. "But we can't help who we are, can we?"

Natasha meets his eyes. "No," she says as the train rumbles forward, pulling them back to their pasts, back to themselves, "I suppose we can't."


End file.
